West to Beijing. What if MacArthur had got his wish?

What if in 1951 Gen. MacArthur had been givin permission to invade China but still wasnt allowed to use nuclear weapons? would the U.S. & its allies ultimatly lose the Korean War? Would the Soviet Union intervene? Would the use of nuclear bombs eventually be a must in the war? These are all questions ive often wondered & would like some input from others.
 
Without nukes I don't see the US pushing very far into China. The expanding front is going to be a real problem; the PLA was huge, and the US/UN forces just weren't. For that matter, would the other UN powers have supported an invasion? If the US has to go it alone they really aren't going to get far.

The US/UN wouldn't LOSE, because as they demonstrated IOTL they could hold a short line across the peninsula. The North/South dividing line might be somewhere different, of course.

Given OTL leadership, I don't see the USSR getting involved. If someone else is GSCP, it is possible.

I don't see Truman authorizing either nukes or the invasion. The nukes, at least, he has a lock on. PoD probably needs to be someone else in the White House.
 
The only way to win that invasion would be to use nukes. I don't think that MacArthur would be able to get into China at all. The Chinese pushed him back in OTL so it's pretty easy to assume that he wouldn't make it very far with a wider front.
 
i think im inclined to agree with yall unless he used nuke MacArthur never wouldve been able to completly defeat the chinese theres just to many of them to stop them totally
 
Given the nature of nuclear weapons available at that time and the size of China and its population I do not see a clear cut US victory even with nuclear weapons.

I see 'Vietnam' half ageneration earlier and on super steroids
 
MacArthur complained about all manner of restrictions preventing him from winning, many of which were lifted at some point yet did not lead to that victory, but his Chinese counterpart was also subject to many restrictions, some of them perhaps more strenuous than what MacArthur was under.

At best a larger South Korea at a higher casualty rate.



Just remember his outrage when he was told that a contingent of 33,000 troops from Taiwan would not be accepted lest it trigger a Chinese response yet when it appeared South Korea(!) might not accept the 1953 armistice the PRC was indeed both willing and able to take heavy losses just to make a point to South Korea, the point involving 25,000 South Korean soldiers killed.
 

The Vulture

Banned
MacArthur was a pipe dreamer, the end result would have been very little accomplished at the cost of thousands of more lives and a souring of international relations for decades.
 
MacArthur was a pipe dreamer, the end result would have been very little accomplished at the cost of thousands of more lives and a souring of international relations for decades.

Try hundreds of thousands. China's national nightmare of the Japanese marching to Nanjing out of Korea was very much a reality in 1951, and for another invader to do the same thing...the only scenario I could think of that would compare would be Operation Downfall.
 
The sad part about all of this is that you could make a case for the invasion being the best option for China during this time. The 20th Century was a time of disaster after disaster for the Chinese people, but the worst of these were the ones inflicted by the CCP on its own people. Even with the use of nuclear weapons on major Chinese cities and invasion and battle deaths, I doubt you'd see deaths much higher than a few million. Even with the Clean Fields/Three Alls policy, the IJA didn't manage to cause more than about 6 million deaths in China, and it wasn't from lack of effort. Compare this to the figures for the Great Leap Forward, which is estimated to have taken between 20 and 44 million lives. Almost any war will end up saving Chinese lives if it ends with Mao's fall from power. Of course, we only know this with the benefit of hindsight. I don't doubt that, in the event of a US invasion bringing a new government to China, the Chinese people would not think the US had done them any favors.

It is all academic in any case--I agree with the others that said the US (and whatever UN forces could be talked into coming along, which I doubt would be too many) would not be able to conquer China. Even with nukes, even with the US putting the same kind of effort into this war that was put into WWII, I think the US would run into the same problem that the Japanese Army did. It would be able to destroy any opposing army that it met in the field, but it would control only the land directly under the boots of the soldiers. As soon as the soldiers moved on, the people will go back to helping repel the invaders. China can always trade space for time.
 
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